He rose slowly to his feet, fighting a stiff wind.
However painful the recollection of his captivity, he was proud that he’d gotten away from Frey. Against all odds, he’d escaped and had nearly fulfilled his mission.
Sebastian raised his fists in triumph, challenging the wind and the rain, daring the lightning to strike him.
The old tower began to quiver violently from the wind and sonic assault from the thunder, shaking loose mortar from between the stones and some of the fairy dust from his memories. At once, he felt a sickness in his stomach. Not from what he’d accomplished but from what he’d missed, what he’d overlooked. Had he really escaped after all or had his hubris in that moment clouded his judgment? He replayed the scene over and over in his mind, trying to make some sense of it. Frey didn’t resist. Why? And then it struck him. Hard as the impending tornado bearing down on Precious Blood.
“What have I done?” he repeated, dropping his head into hands, allowing himself a rare moment of doubt and self-pity.
A sudden burning across his arms and legs. The colored glass, splintered timber, and finishing nails that had been lying at his feet began to swirl upward like a vortex in a hurricane-force gust, almost revolving around him like a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. The storm was upon him. He covered up as plywood and planks crashed down relentlessly in the belfry around him, knocking him to the cement floor. It was loud as a battlefield, but the only sound Sebastian could hear was the sound of his own voice, filled with a painful realization. He had put the girls in more danger than he could have ever imagined.
“Oh, my God. Frey could have stopped me. He let me go.”
“It’s getting really dark,” Agnes said, noting that things got strangely still for a moment. “Where is he?”
CeCe wondered the same. “Maybe I should—”
The crashing sound in the bell tower reverberated through the church below as beams weakened from the renovation and from the storm blew around like toothpicks. The organ began to play, random keys triggered by the shaking and falling ceiling plaster. Torrents of water were breaking through the roof, turning the balcony into an indoor waterfall.
“Tornado!” Lucy screamed, steadying herself as the entire church seemed to roll from back to front, side to side.
Cecilia stumbled to the vestibule and yelled up the stairwell to no avail. Debris and plaster dust from above tumbled down like vomit covering the railing, the steps, and her boots. She sucked in a mouthful of grit and began to choke on it. Plaster dust filled her sinuses and nasal cavity. Red-faced and runny-nosed, she yelled up as loudly as she could. “Sebastian!” She strained to listen for a reply but none came. She was about to race up after him when Lucy grabbed her from behind. “Let me go! He might be hurt.”
“You might get hurt,” Lucy chided, sensing something desperately wrong.
“I’m not going to let him die up there.”
“We need to stay together. Or we’ll die down here.” Lucy looked up and pointed. Huge pieces of plaster were cracking along the vestibule ceiling directly overhead.
“Run!” CeCe shouted, pulling Lucy along through the nave and nearly out of her peep toes.
All hell was breaking loose outside and in.
A whoosh of wind and the plywood from upper windows began to creak and shake loose. The entire church was transformed into a giant wind tunnel as the twister came ever closer. They felt the oxygen ripped from their lungs. It was breathtaking, literally.
Windowpanes in the clerestory, already cracked and fragile from construction jackhammers, dropped shards of glass over the sills and into the aisles, hitting the floor and detonating just inches behind their heels, turning the onetime house of worship into a real-time house of terror. Scaffolding swayed in the stiff draft and collapsed like small buildings during a demolition. CeCe and Lucy grabbed for their heads as they raced toward the altar, their calves imbedded with splinters and sharp, multicolored fragments of leaded glass, covered in grime and dripping blood.
The wind and rain blasted through the open window casements and chased them down the center aisle almost the entire length of the church. Cecilia motioned to Agnes up ahead, hugging the marble communion rails for dear life, and the girls dived for the relative safety of the pews before any more of the doomed edifice crashed down. Cecilia covered Agnes with her body, protecting her from the falling boards and glass, like a soldier taking a bullet for a comrade.
“I thought I’d be safe here!” Agnes screamed.
“You are,” Cecilia said. “I got you.”
“I feel like we’re under attack!” Lucy shouted back.
Cecilia made the decision to fall back. “We gotta get out of this place.”
“And go where? For a ride on the Cyclone out there? In the pitch-black?” Lucy challenged. “Are you nuts?”
Cecilia wiped at the warm liquid dripping down her legs and tasted it. It was blood. She eyed Agnes’s wraps. “The sacristy. Follow me.”
They bolted for the sacristy door, Cecilia dragging Agnes, and Lucy, expensive heels now in hand, falling in quickly behind.
Sisters-in-arms running for cover. Racing the storm and running for their lives.
Sloshing through puddled rain and over muddy marble floors. Their bare feet unable to gain any traction on the slippery tile beneath them.
Agnes slipped out of Cecilia’s moistened grasp and tripped over a few pieces of wood littering the aisle, landing on her hands and letting out a loud cry.
Lucy stopped and lifted Agnes to her feet in an adrenaline rush of strength, much as Sebastian had lifted her. She was careful not to pull at her wrists.
“C’mon,” Lucy shouted, helping Agnes along.
Cecilia reached for the door and flung it open. Agnes ducked in and then Lucy slammed it closed behind them, shutting the worst of the storm out, at least for that moment. The quiet was a relief.
“Can you move any slower?” Lucy exhaled in frustration at Agnes. “We should have left you back there.”
“I’m sorry. I did my best,” Agnes said, throwing her matted mane away from her face. “Thanks for helping me.”
“Hey,” Cecilia called over, signaling Lucy not to push it. “Chill.”
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Lucy offered apologetically.
“It’s okay,” Agnes said, leaning her head on Lucy’s shoulder.
The physical contact took Lucy off guard. She hadn’t let a girlfriend close enough to touch her, let alone console her, for a long time. If ever. She reached out for Agnes and slipped her hands under her thick mane and around both sides of her face. “I’d never do you like that,” Lucy whispered.
Agnes kneeled down and brushed her fingers along both girls’ legs, feeling for bits of glass, which she picked out gently one by one from each of them. She wiped at the tiny cuts with the gauze from her wrappings. “Not exactly sanitary,” Agnes said, “but it’s the best I can do.”
Cecilia and Lucy scanned the room from floor to ceiling. Flaking paint, bubbling plaster, water damage, and mold creeping along the walls and ceiling signaled to them that Agnes was more than a little right.
Lucy looked down at the wraps around Agnes’s wrists and saw they were looking wet and stained not just with their blood but with Agnes’s own.
“We should probably change those,” Lucy said. “How are your arms?”
“They hurt.”
Lucy reached for Agnes’s forehead as she stood up, to get a sense of her temperature, and noticed her skin felt cool and clammy. She could feel that Agnes was getting increasingly unsteady on her feet by how tightly she was beginning to hold her arm. The November daylight was fading fast as the storm was waxing once again. Without even the cold white glow of the corner streetlamps, still silenced by the blackout, night was falling unchallenged.
Cecilia proceeded to light the votives stacked on the cabinet from her single taper and positioned them throughout the room, turning the walls into funhouse mirrors of flickering shadows.
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Agnes appeared flushed and sweaty.
“Let me get a look at them,” Lucy said. “Cecilia, can you bring that candle closer?”
Lucy rubbed at her eyes, which were blurry now and watery from the dust and mildew. Agnes winced as Lucy untied the knotted fabric holding the wraps on. The black threads that cinched the wounds together were shiny in the light, and the edges of the cuts were still red, raw and oozing. Unhealed. It was in that stage where it wasn’t possible to tell if she was getting better or worse.
Lucy made an amateur but accurate diagnosis. “That’s not looking too good.”
“Don’t scare her,” Cecilia whispered harshly.
“Maybe you should leave?” Lucy pressed. “Go back to the hospital.”
“No!” Agnes shouted, mustering every bit of strength.
“She’s not going anywhere in this weather. Who even knows if there is a hospital left,” Cecilia said, taking charge. “Let’s just keep the wounds clean and dry for now.”
Agnes ambled over quickly, leaning slightly, arms limp at her sides and exposed to the dank air, as if navigating a balance beam in gym class.
“Don’t humor her. This is serious. Her wrists are infected,” Lucy said, grabbing Cecilia’s arm. “People die from this shit.”
“And they also die in tornados!” Cecilia shouted. “I’ll talk to her. Just give us a minute, okay?”
Lucy nodded.
“Do you smell something? Something sweet?” Agnes asked. “Is it roses? I smell roses.”
Now Cecilia was getting worried. Not that she could smell much of anything, but the only scent starting to come through was the stink of rot from Agnes’s arms.
“Maybe some late bloomers survived in the courtyard,” Cecilia said unconvincingly, since it had been far too cold lately.
“I don’t want to leave,” Agnes pleaded.
“Here? Or him?” Cecilia asked, turning the faucet on and gently cleansing Agnes’s wound.
“You don’t either. I can see it in your face. Lucy’s, too.”
“We’re all going to have to leave eventually,” CeCe said. “The storm can’t last forever. Nothing can.”
“Maybe not, but we need to worry about right now,” Lucy interjected. “That door is not going to hold much longer.”
CeCe wrapped Agnes’s arms quickly and tried to think.
The heavy bronze inlaid wooden portal they’d entered through suddenly began to shimmy on its rusted hinges. It was beautiful, solid, a work of art in and of itself—or had been once, until it was allowed to fall into such disrepair. With nothing to barricade it, the door would soon be useless against the encroaching winds. The flooding rain was already beginning to seep underneath.
They felt trapped.
“We need to keep going,” Cecilia said, a new urgency in her tone.
“To where?” Lucy asked.
“There,” Agnes spoke up, pointing toward the smaller rear door.
“Outside?”
“No, Sebastian said it goes to a chapel downstairs.”
“Underneath the church?” Cecilia asked, wondering if she might be completely delirious. “Have you seen it?”
“No,” Agnes answered, turning her wrists to CeCe. “I tried to open it but I couldn’t. Sebastian said I should try again when I was ready.”
“No way the storm can touch us down there,” Lucy observed, eyeing the door.
“He said something else,” Agnes added.
“What?” Lucy asked skeptically.
“That the answers were down there.”
“Answers?” CeCe asked.
“To our questions. Why we’re here,” Agnes added.
Lucy was getting spooked. She felt Agnes was beginning to ramble, her elevated white blood cell count speaking for her, distorting her reality. And theirs. She was afraid to go down, but the alternative was far more frightening.
Cecilia grabbed a few long candles and lit them. “Hurry! It’s not safe by that door.” She handed Agnes and Lucy each a candle and they scrambled quickly for the door. “It’s now or never. Are we ready to try it?”
“Ready,” Agnes said.
“Lucy?”
“Ready,” Lucy responded.
They each took hold of the large oval knob.
“Pull!” Lucy screamed.
“We can do this!” CeCe wailed.
With all their strength they tugged at it, again and again.
The three of them.
Refusing to stop.
Until it gave way.
“We’re safe,” Agnes wheezed.
“We’ll see,” CeCe said.
They slipped through the doorway just as the sacristy door burst free of its hinges, hitting the cellar door and slamming it with a horrible thud. They were thrust into complete darkness, darker even than when they’d first arrived at the church.
Lucy lit a small candle that she’d been carrying around with her and handed it over to Cecilia, who stretched her long arms out in front of her.
“Either this is a staircase or it’s the biggest walk-in closet ever,” Lucy said. They walked slowly down. The steps were cobblestone and slick from condensation like old cellar steps in a brownstone. The smell of staleness intensified with each step downward.
With only a tiny flame to light the way, the staircase seemed endless, as if they were descending into a catacomb, the very bowels of the city, of the earth, even. The passage narrowed and headspace shrank, but the deeper they went, the safer they felt. The safest, in fact, since they’d arrived.
“All right?” Cecilia said, pausing for a moment.
“Yes,” said Lucy. “I do my best work in the dark.”
“Too many club nights,” Cecilia swiped, adding a little comic relief.
“Back at you,” Lucy lobbed.
At the bottom of the steps, another wooden door, shorter and squatter than the one above, was gradually revealed in the candlelight, the panels painted in a medieval style—angel head statues, alert and at-the-ready expressions with child-sized hands supporting cherubic chins, rough hewn from stone rather than cast and molded in plaster, appeared to guard the entrance on either side. A cross of bone sat above the entrance.
“I don’t know about this,” Lucy said, ogling the bleached-white cruciform.
“Do you think it’s like one of those Wild West warnings? A scalp nailed to the fort door?” Cecilia put on her most ominous voice. “‘Come no farther.’”
Agnes shed a bit more candlelight on the door and ran her fingers into the groove cut into it.
Carved into the door were the words “Omnes Sancti.” Running along the archway from one side to the other, lettered in faded and chipped gold paint were more words that they could barely see or understand.
“You’re the Catholic schoolgirl,” Lucy said to Agnes. “Go ahead. Make your mommy proud.”
Agnes read the inscription of unfamiliar words, haltingly, phonetically.
“Probasti cor meum
visitasti nocte
igne me examinasti
et non est inventa in me iniquitas”1
“What do you think that means?” Cecilia asked. “I only speak pig Latin.”
“I have no idea,” Agnes offered apologetically.
“All that money down the drain,” Cecilia said, squeezing Agnes’s shoulder.
“I’m betting it says something like ‘Must be taller than this Roman numeral to ride,’” Lucy joked nervously, running her fingers along the splintered indentations of the letters like a blind person.
“No,” Agnes said, accessing what little Latin she’d learned in class. “It’s something about a trial, I think.”
“Why would there be a courtroom under a church?” Lucy asked.
“Or a prison,” Cecilia added.
Each felt the bolt of doubt and fear shoot up their spine, like the punishing electric shock from a Skinner box, but said nothing.
“C’mon,” Cecilia said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s not freak
ourselves out.”
“Maybe we should wait for Sebastian,” Agnes suggested. “Who knows what’s in there?”
Lucy ignored her and stepped forward to take the lead.
“Seeing is believing,” she said, reaching for the ornate iron handle.
Lucy’s jaw dropped as the interior came into view.
“No need to wait for Sebastian. I think he knows where this place is.”
Cecilia slid by her and through the doorway into the room, with Agnes in tow. Their reaction too was silence, turned mute by complete sensory overload.
Unlike the dinginess of the stairwell and church above, the circular room was beautifully lit with station after station of burning votives in opaque rose-colored glass cups. Semi-hardened pools of melted wax grew drop by drop on the floor beneath them. The blazing light was almost painful, shining into every crevice of the chapel. It was vibrant and bright, brimming with signs of life and reminders of death all at once.
Most striking was an enormous chandelier—more of a candelabra—hanging above the center of the chapel, made masterfully and entirely of human bones. It swayed gently at the breeze of fresh air admitted by the open entrance, candleholders full of melted paraffin bubbled menacingly, straining to contain the overflow and threatening to spill over. Bone fragments of various shapes and sizes were strewn about like broken clamshells on a pebble beach.
Two large monstrances were bookended by a small altar, legs also made from bone, along with two lecterns, each holding an open book.
The front of the altar was bordered by three wooden and velvet kneelers. Behind the altar was a floor-to-ceiling fresco of the Sacred Heart, pierced and encircled by a crown of thorns oozing blood. Four sculptures, veiled with linen sheets tied tightly with twine, sat on marble pedestals before it.
“Not a courtroom or a prison,” Cecilia observed faintly.
“A tomb,” Agnes offered.
They walked in slowly, turning their necks up and around with each step, trying to take in the compact magnificence of the space. It was beautiful but eerie, conjuring a far more intense reaction in them than the larger edifice above.